


smacked upside of the head by the harsh daylight

by paperclipbitch



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Community: cottoncandy_bingo, F/M, Gen, i don't know why the movie renamed him peter either, i just love pietro and wanda sfm, i know wanda wasn't in the movie, idk it's after one am let's have all the tags, like they could be really close if you wanted them to be, no attempt to make the seventies look like the seventies, only really incest if you squint, shut up, what's up with that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-27
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-26 16:51:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1695518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[set during <i>Days of Future Past</i>]</p><p>“Bad idea,” Wanda sing-songs. </p><p>“I haven’t had a good one since nineteen sixty-three,” Peter replies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	smacked upside of the head by the harsh daylight

**Author's Note:**

> [Written for cottoncandy_bingo - _adventure/quest_.] SPOILERS for the movie obvs.
> 
> 1\. I'm calling Pietro "Peter" because the movie randomly did so I figure I'll just go with their stupid canon.  
> 2\. I've possibly messed with the 70s timeline a bit, IDK how long that went on for.  
> 3\. I've made no attempt to make the 70s sound like the 70s tbh, except making sure relevant arcade games and books existed.  
> 4\. There’s that adorbs scene where Peter is hugging his baby sister and it’s DARLING, and I refuse to believe that she’s Wanda because TWINS, DUDES, but because I needed something to call their little sister and also I would sort of love it if it were true, I’m calling her “Lorna”, ‘k?

“Bad idea,” Wanda sing-songs. 

“I haven’t had a good one since nineteen sixty-three,” Peter replies.

“At least,” Wanda snorts, but looks up from her book long enough to frown a little. “If mom finds out about this-”

“I _know_ ,” Peter says, and goes back downstairs to rifle through Charles Xavier’s wallet again, and Hank McCoy’s, and then the pockets of the guy who has no identifying details on him whatsoever. When he comes back upstairs, Wanda hasn’t even turned the page yet.

“They’re not cops,” he says, sitting down on the end of her bed.

“You never thought they were cops,” Wanda counters. “It’s still a bad idea.”

He hasn’t told her what the men downstairs want him to do: he doesn’t have to.

“Just keep mom distracted,” he says. “You’ve got my back, yeah?”

Wanda sighs, and he goes back downstairs to tell the guys he’ll do it, comes back to catch the end of the exhale.

“I always do,” she says, and he takes _The Second Sex_ out of her hands, marking her place with a candy wrapper, and chucks it on the nightstand. Wanda doesn’t even blink at her suddenly empty hands, just sighs as he crams onto the bed to press a kiss to her forehead. She curls her fingers around his wrist, just for a moment, and he pulls away and leaves before either of them can say _goodbye_.

-

Eight weeks ago – he thinks; his time and the rest of the world’s time are completely disparate – Peter skidded into the house, arms full of _Space Race_. Arcade games are much too heavy for him, but if he keeps moving then he tends not to notice until it’s too late. 

It looked kind of nice next to _Pong Doubles_. Symmetrical. 

The knee of his jeans was torn and his breath was too tight in his chest – not from running; he could run for ever if he wanted to, but _damn_ , that thing was heavy – and Wanda looked up from _The Bell Jar_ long enough to say: “shouldn’t have hit up the same arcade.”

“They’re never gonna believe I could lift the game,” Peter replied, flopping onto the couch next to her.

“I’m pretty sure they think you’re a criminal gang,” Wanda told him. Peter went to get a soda, checked that their mom was still upstairs washing Lorna’s hair, stole a couple of her cigarettes out of her purse, and came back to Wanda. “Also, do you have to do this in broad daylight?”

“I got away clean,” Peter insisted, and Wanda hooked a finger into the rip in his jeans, arching an eyebrow. “Almost clean.”

Wanda closed her eyes and her lips moved and when she opened them again a few seconds – an _hour_ – later she informed him: “the cops are nearly here.”

“Fuck,” Peter said. “ _Fuck_.”

It’s not as though they can _catch_ him or prove he did anything and he’s pretty sure there isn’t a cell that could hold him – he _knows_ there isn’t a cell that can hold him – but he does try to make things a little easier on their mom these days.

He moved _Space Race_ upstairs into Lorna’s bedroom, and then remembered why he tried not to move heavy shit up flights of stairs, even when moving fast enough to splinter most of the forces acting on him. Something like that: school went _really well_ for him, of course.

Wanda was still reading _The Bell Jar_ , was still on the same page, when he got back. She did look up long enough to smirk at him and the new ugly tear in his t-shirt where he’d gotten it caught on the controls.

There was a loud bang on the door, and Peter ran back upstairs, tried to move _Space Race_ again, and succeeded in accidentally tipping it over, crushing Lorna’s beloved dollhouse and making an ugly noise that he just _knew_ could be heard outside. Swearing between his teeth, he tried to pick it up again, felt something in his back click, and gave up, heading back down to Wanda.

“Make it not happen,” he said. Their mom’s footsteps could be heard on the stairs.

Wanda laid her book aside – deliberately slowly. “Sorry?”

“Make it not happen,” Peter insisted. “Please. Please. _Make this stop happening_.”

Wanda closed her eyes, curled her fingers into the position Peter knew meant she was concentrating, and started mumbling under her breath. Her fingers flared pink and the world sort of… _shattered_ and then put itself back together again, slightly different. No one was yelling outside, Lorna was upstairs whining about getting shampoo in her eyes, and when he looked down his jeans and t-shirt were intact again.

He went to check Lorna’s room.

“You didn’t have to take the game back,” he complained.

Wanda widened her eyes up at him. “I can’t control it,” she said, overly innocent, and reached for the cigarettes tucked into his pocket. “You going to give me one of those or what?”

-

Peter doesn’t tell them about his sisters. They don’t ask – even though Logan keeps sending him thoughtful looks in the rearview mirror; _too_ thoughtful, really – and anyway they seem to have enough problems of their own to deal with. The professor guy has an honest-to-god _hipflask_ that isn’t full of water, and the twitchy nerd with the glasses keeps looking like he’s going to open the car door and run for it at any given moment.

And they’re driving so goddamn _slowly_.

Wanda will tell their mom that Peter is hanging out with friends and definitely keeping to the straight and narrow, and their mom will believe her because she _wants_ to. Peter leaves Logan bickering with Hank at a gas station, borrows a handful of change from the kiosk’s cash register, and calls home from a payphone: three rings, and then he hangs up. 

He and Wanda invented this code years back, when Peter wasn’t as good a criminal as he is now. Three means that everything’s fine; four means _find me and fucking get me out of whatever shit I’ve gotten myself into_. 

Wanda is fond of telling Peter that her power wasn’t actually designed to cancel out Peter’s fuck-ups, but they’re twins, they’re supposed to have some kind of symmetry in their powers, right? It can’t be a coincidence that Wanda can fix whatever he breaks.

He’s back before Logan’s ground out his second asshole comment, grinning like he’s been here the whole time. Xavier slides his sunglasses down long enough to give Peter a thoughtful, unreadable expression. 

Peter shrugs and grins wider and Xavier looks pained.

-

His hair was always grey, even when he was a kid, too little for his powers to manifest. The kids at school used to make fun of him, and he was always fast before he was _fast_ , quick with fists and yelling and his mom seemed a permanent fixture in the principal’s office.

Wanda was quieter, but just as fierce, specialising in unnerving with a side of snarling that made other little girls keep their distance.

It was kind of scary, the first few times that their mom opened the fridge to make dinner only to find it packed full of Wanda’s favourite ice cream, and only Wanda’s favourite ice cream; the first few times the world slowed to a stop around Peter and nobody noticed but him. He didn’t have the basement then, they still shared a bedroom upstairs, twin beds with matching covers and passive-aggressively pulling down each other’s choice of posters. He’d try to talk to Wanda about it, because he’d never _not_ talked to Wanda about anything, but he could tell she was worrying about something else, something she tried to put into words but he still couldn’t get it.

When they were _very_ young, young enough to crawl into their mom’s bed after nightmares, she had an old creaky double bed with a ridiculously warped metal headboard, too twisted and erratic to be art. Peter used to run his fingers over the bumps and curls of it sometimes, when they were tucked up in bed with their mom being read fairytales that made Wanda’s eyes light up.

That was what he thought about, when their mom sat them both down and said that their father – their permanently absent father, who presumably had no clue that twin copies of him were wandering around on the planet – hadn’t been… normal. He’d been able to control metal, she said, to bend and shape and move it to her will. Wanda had been quiet and thoughtful, and Peter had demanded why she hadn’t _told_ them, hadn’t _warned_ them, before, too loud and too confrontational for the situation, as he always is.

Later on, back in their twin beds, the lights out and their mom asleep, Peter knew Wanda wasn’t asleep. He rolled onto his side, to watch the dark shape of her under the sheets, in the little light streaking through the blinds, and said: “do you mind? That we’re different?”

Wanda can hide in ways Peter can’t; even if he tied himself down and made himself stay still, live life in every boring goddamn second, he still can’t get rid of the hair. He’s tried dye and he’s tried scissors and it never changes. He doesn’t try anymore, but it’s distinctive. Wanda has dark hair that may or may not have been their father’s and she looks normal.

Well, that’s cruel, she looks like _Wanda_ , who could never be _ordinary_ , not like everyone else, but the rest of the world doesn’t know that.

“We’re different together,” Wanda told him at last, voice soft. “That’s the important part, isn’t it?”

-

They go for the Pentagon tomorrow; they’re staying in a motel like any of them are going to sleep tonight.

Xavier gets scotch from somewhere – it’s possible it’s been in the trunk all along, Peter only checked long enough to make sure there weren’t any bodies in there – and sits with bitter cigarettes and a difficult expression on the balcony. Hank collapses onto the bed like he might actually pass out, and god knows where Logan’s disappeared off to, with his crypic references to the future and his terrible, _terrible_ attitude.

“So,” Peter says, once he’s made his way around the motel, establishing who’s in what room and if anyone has anything worth acquiring, and still finds himself with change left over from three minutes, “you’re breaking out this guy so you can go find your sister?”

Xavier stiffens, and then nods at last, without looking at him.

Between one drag of Xavier’s cigarette and the next, Peter swims eighteen laps of the motel’s locked pool until he spots a condom on the bottom of it and decides to get out, drying off his hair on the run back upstairs again.

“Sisters, huh?” he says.

Xavier’s smile is bitter, brittle. Peter doesn’t want to know the story behind it; he hopes he never has to look like that when someone brings up Wanda. Or Lorna, he mentally adds quickly.

It’s not that he forgets Lorna, of course he doesn’t, it’s just that he doesn’t think about her the way he thinks about Wanda.

“Sisters,” Xavier agrees flatly, and after a second offers Peter the scotch.

“I can’t believe anyone ever let you teach kids,” Peter shrugs, but takes it anyway.

Xavier’s mouth twists, sharp, but he doesn’t say anything else. That’s okay; Peter’s pretty sure he’s not ready to ever hear it.

-

Wanda’s the only person Peter would ever consider slowing down for.

There’ve been other girls – at school, around town – and he still ran laps while on dates with them, still found himself doing a dozen other things when he should’ve been focusing on a conversation at hand. Making out and watching the clock freeze because time moved like molasses, dark and sticky and unpleasant.

With Wanda, he can sit and just watch her reading, turning page after page, inexorable and measured, and not feel time sticking to him at all. 

-

“I brought you this baseball cap from the Pentagon security team,” Peter says, dropping it into Wanda’s lap.

“You bring me the sweetest presents I can’t ever use,” Wanda responds. She has a closet full of street signs, neatly alphabetical; Peter offers to take them back or at least to a junk yard from time to time, but she refuses to let him.

Peter elbows her until she shifts over so they can both lie on her bed; not exactly comfortable, overlapping all over the place, but safely familiar after a couple of days in a world with bullets that might’ve been plastic but were decidedly real, and adults with looks in their eyes that he doesn’t want to think about any more.

He tells her the _good_ bits, the seamless way he broke Erik Lehnsherr out of what was supposed to be the most secure jail on the planet, and then made all the security guards look like asses without even trying, and Wanda laughs in the right places and digs him in the ribs when he describes making the guys punch each other in the face.

He glosses over how it felt to move a bullet in the air, because he’s still thinking about that, the warmth of it against his fingertips, the knowledge of what could happen if he just flicked it the other way with an idle nail.

“You know who the drunk, homeless-looking professor was, don’t you?” Wanda says at last, pushing herself up on her elbow and leaning over him to grab one of the scientific journals she occasionally gets from the university library. Peter says he’ll get them for her, but she says she likes changing the world in simple ways like that: the journal exists in their home, now, and has always existed in their home. There was never a reality where it existed in the university library. That’s how she puts it, anyway.

“Yeah, I know all the drunk, homeless-looking professors,” Peter scoffs. “I collect their pictures like Captain America cards.”

Wanda huffs and pokes him, but waves the journal at him. “He’s _Charles Xavier_ , that genetics professor I told you about?”

Wanda did research when they first got their gifts in ways Peter didn’t. He set about trying to see how far he could run and then get home again without anyone noticing he’d been gone. Wanda’s experiments involved a lot more reading.

Pete takes the journal from her and frowns at it. “I remember you telling me some stuff that literally nobody but you and the guy who wrote this understand,” he says at last. “You’re telling me that Drunken Badly-Dressed Professor Misery is _this_ guy?”

“I did wonder where he disappeared to,” Wanda says quietly, and her expression is unexpectedly sad.

They lie, side-by-side, in silence for a while.

“I think I helped the guy who killed JFK break out of jail,” Peter says at last. “Like, you can make that not happen if it turns out that was a fucking awful idea, right?”

Wanda groans, and smacks him in the face with the journal. Peter is feeling just bad enough to stay still and let it actually hit him.

“You are the worst brother in the history of the world,” she informs him, but there’s no real heat in her voice.

“Hey,” Peter protests, “I stole you a security guard hat from the Pentagon!”

Wanda turns on her side to give him one of her sly smiles. “Yeah,” she says, “yeah, I guess you did.”

-


End file.
